About me

I grew up in the wilds of New York City before there were coyotes in Central Park. My parents were theater people, and for many summers we operated a summer stock theater in the Poconos. From those theater years and from reading countless books, I fell in love with the power of the story to make us laugh, learn, love and cry. I studied writing at Cornell University, University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. I had a play produced in a small Los Angeles theater. My short stories have won prizes in various contests and appeared in bosque (the magazine) and Redwood Writers’ Vintage Voices Anthologies. For a living, I practice law. 

My father John and his older brother Bob, 1932.

COYOTE WINDS was inspired by my father’s stories of growing up in eastern Colorado during the Dust Bowl. While his stories were full of blowing grit, he also described a kind of freedom that I fear has disappeared for today’s boys. I wanted to contrast my father’s unfenced boyhood of hunting rabbits and snaring rattlesnakes with the life of a modern boy who can’t ride a bike without a helmet and has to carry hand sanitizer in his backpack.

In researching the time I discovered that the Dust Bowl is a classic American story. Many people don’t realize that the Dust Bowl was a man-made ecological disasters. That can-do American spirit  that got us to the moon blinded us to the consequences of plowing up dry land the size of Ohio. When the rains stopped, the land began to lift as dust.  COYOTE WINDS explores what happens to that American can-do spirit when it runs into drought and the Depression.